P&PC Broadcasting this Week from the Studios at Columbia University Press

For this week's posting, P&PC is sitting in with the Columbia University Press blog as part of its special National Poetry Month programming. There, you can not only enter to win a six pack of poetry, but you can also read a mini-memoir about how and why one person in the P&PC Office was moved this past year to get part of Robert Creeley's poem "I Know a Man" tattooed on his arms.

Even better than all of that, however, is how, for a limited time, you can take advantage of CUP's Spring Sale to score a 50% discount on Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America. If you're a customer in the U.S. or Canada, just enter the coupon code SALE in your shopping cart, click "apply," and your half-off savings will be calculated. Why not take a moment out of your National Poetry Month festivities and head on over today?

The Spectacle of Everyday Reading (and Coupon Codes) at the Modernist Studies Association

From October 18-21, P&PC participated in the Modernist Studies Association's annual conference, this year held at the airport-like Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas and appropriately structured around the theme of "Modernism & Spectacle." Surrounded by everything we love, hate, love to hate, and hate to love about the Entertainment Capital of the World, P&PC presented on one panel ("Beyond Modernist Periodization"), chaired another panel ("Spectacular Language and Projected Verse"), hobnobbed with new and old friends and colleagues, and even got a chance to visit the center of Vegas home-brew activity, Aces & Ales. As you might assume from our lack of posting activity over the past two weeks, we've been trying to recover ever since. No, we didn't get a Mike Tyson tattoo on our face, nor did we meet up with Zach Galifianakis, nor did much happen that had to stay in Vegas. But the city's crush of bikini-clad dancers, artificial light and smell, slot machine chimes, overpriced everything, and lots of sloshed, overweight people staggering by on the sidewalks wearing balloon hats and fake grass skirts put us in a bit of a funk from which we're just beginning to emerge.

By far, for us, the most memorable part of this year's MSA was the first release of Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America, which Columbia University Press featured at its book table, which will hit warehouses in a week or two, and which P&PC got to hold for the very first time. It's beautiful—and it sold! Indeed, perhaps due to some shameless promotion on the part of this blog and its associates, it was Columbia's best-selling conference title; when we left for the airport, only one copy remained on the book table, and we've got our fingers crossed that that one went as well. Maybe Everyday Reading wasn't dressed up in a balloon hat or a fake grass skirt—can you imagine the gents on the book cover at Treasure Island or the Luxor?—but it found its own little place in the desert that we won't soon forget.

We're hoping that Everyday Reading might find a place with you, too. It found a happy home with SUNY Buffalo graduate student Margaret Konkol (pictured here), who got a copy and a personalized inscription for a consumer-friendly conference discount. And even if you weren't at MSA, P&PC has made sure that you can get a hefty discount if you order right from Columbia University Press as well. That's right: if you use the coupon code EVECHA, Columbia will—as a courtesy to P&PC readers and friends—give you a 30%-off discount. That brings the cost of Everyday Reading to under $20, or to just about the cost of printing four boarding passes ($5 each) at the Flamingo Hotel. We're not going to say that the opportunity to get out of Vegas isn't worth it—we were more than ready to go. But what's going to stick with you longer: the breakfast buffet at the Westin ($22.96), six coffees from Java Detour ($3.23 each), two rolls of quarters and an hour sitting at the slots, or the 302 pages of Everyday Reading? Hold on for a moment—is P&PC making a spectacle of itself? I guess maybe we learned something from Vegas after all.

Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America

It's not every day that the P&PC Office gets to knock off early, put up streamers, call in the oompah band, and put out the punch bowl—this particular ship is much too tightly run to have much of that—but that's exactly what's on the docket for this coming October when Columbia University Press officially releases Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America. The office interns are having a hard time hiding their excitement about it—and we'll admit to being a bit giddy too, as page proofs have just arrived for review—and they've convinced us to do two things to let off a little steam: leak the very cool cover design pictured here (check), and give the P&PC faithful first crack at getting a copy of their own, which can be pre-ordered here (double check).

Many of you know that Everyday Reading has been a long time in the making, and we're not about to get sentimental about it and all the people who made it possible just yet—not with five months to go before it actually drops—so we'll stick to the facts as dispassionately as possible for the time being. The book is 320 pages long, has five chapters and forty illustrations, and, roughly speaking, covers the years between the Progressive Era and the end of the Cold War. It's got vintage poetry scrapbooks and some of the stories of the people who assembled them; it goes back to some of the nationally-broadcast old time radio poetry shows that were so popular in the 1920s and 1930s that they sometimes received upwards of 50,000 fan letters per month; it takes more than a drive-by at the poetics of Burma-Shave billboards and other forms of advertising poetry; it gets a little gossipy in examining the Hallmark greeting card poetry written by the longtime director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Paul Engle, and how that experience might have shaped Engle's vision for what an M.F.A. program might be; and it hazards more than a guess or two at how this thriving, diverse culture of popular verse not only affected some of the canonical poets whom we read in English classes today but was also—before the advent of the Hollywood blockbuster film, television, rock and roll, video games, and the Internet—a driving force in the development of popular culture dynamics as we experience them today. "In a modern American fueled by consumer capitalism and new media and communication formats," the introduction reads in part, "poetry had tens of millions of readers." Who those readers were, who wrote (and oftentimes got paid for) that poetry, how it got used, why most of it's been forgotten, and why it's important for us to remember and study it now are some of the main questions Everyday Reading is after.

That's enough about Everyday Reading for now. Stop back in the coming weeks for a variety of new postings scheduled for the summer months including commentary from our new Periodic Consultant on the poetry (specifically the iambic pentameter) of organic chemistry; an interview with a famous paper specialist on the material poetics and cultural significance of Trader Joe's poem "Sonnet for a Paper Napkin"; a review of John Timberman Newcomb's new book from the University of Illinois Press, How Did Poetry Survive? The Making of Modern American Verse; the advertising of Walt Whitman as seen by our house Whitmaniac; and the poetry of bird watching, cat treats, and even—as P&PC keeps going, and going, and going—the Energizer bunny.